The bad boy of ballet looks great in an update of Coppélia that lacks heart for David Dougill

The Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet is the company in which the former Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin found a new home, with its artistic director, Igor Zelensky, as his mentor. When the ­Stanislavsky’s visit to the Coliseum was announced, in Roland Petit’s production of Coppélia, Polunin was the headline attraction. There had been all that hoo-ha about his failure to appear in Peter Schaufuss’s Midnight Express and speculation over whether he would turn up for his next London assignment. Well, he did, and the first-night audience left no doubt, in its thunderous applause, whom they had come to see.

Curiously, though, when the curtains opened to reveal Polunin standing motionless, there was pin-drop silence. Ballet’s “bad boy”, as the press has dubbed him, looked not just good, but perfect — blessed with the elegant physique of the ideal classical dancer and a breathtaking technique that produces astounding leaps and turns of every